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© St. Petersburg Times, published May 18, 2002
If you ever need a definition for "trouper," just say the name of Spring Hill singer/actor Betsy Glasson.
Ask Saul Leibner, the director of Brighton Beach Memoirs, the show playing now at Stage West Community Playhouse.
The story started the day after Brighton Beach opened on May 9, when supporting actor Mary Eileen Ameigh was suddenly taken ill. Around the time she should have been on her way to Stage West to perform the key role of Blanche, she was, instead, on her way to the hospital for help.
"At 5:15 Friday evening, I called Betsy," Leibner said. "She came to the theater at 6:30. Molly Lutz fitted her with a costume, and at 10 minutes of 7, she walked on the stage to have a very quick run-through.
"She practiced backstage, and at 8:05, the play went on with Betsy using a script.
"We offered the audience the opportunity to (exchange) a ticket for another performance of any show next year. They all declined and stayed to the end of the play. They afforded the entire cast a standing ovation."
After minor surgery, Mary Eileen made a quick recovery and returned on Saturday to do the evening show.
"Kudos to my good friend, Betsy Glasson," a relieved Leibner said. "She's a trouper."
Leibner is no theater slouch himself.
When he and his wife, Roz, were vacationing in Australia last fall, they noticed a community theater near their hotel. In a sort of busman's holiday, they bypassed Australia's surf and sights and went to the community theater instead.
"It was Don't Dress for Dinner, a French farce translated into English," Leibner said. "It's six people, quick moving," just his kind of show. "We laughed and laughed," he said.
The minute Leibner got back to Spring Hill, he called Richey Suncoast board president Charlie Skelton and asked him to read the play.
"Charlie loved it," Leibner said. Skelton took the play to his play-reading committee, and they loved it, too.
The upshot is that Richey Suncoast will put on the play in October -- and Leibner has agreed to direct it.
One performer has already said she plans to audition: Betsy Glasson.
Lucky Diana Forgione, the founder and director of Avenue Players acting troupe.
Later this year, she's going to Norway to see plays by Henrik Ibsen and to London to see Shakespeare's Twelfth Night in the replica of the Globe Theatre on the banks of the Thames River.
I love Ibsen's unsentimental plays about the status of women that were so far ahead of his time (his best stuff was written in the 1880s), but every time I mention his name, I think of the time I was teaching college literature in the late 1960s and referred to Ibsen with the Anglicized pronunciation of his name. All at once, a young student who usually slept through my class snapped to attention and listened with slack-jawed amazement through the rest of the session.
I was so elated that I had finally touched a chord with the young man that I asked him why he was so captured by this particular playwright.
"I've been watching that guy on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In for years, but I had no idea he wrote all those plays, too," he said.
Sure thing. And if you think that's something, my young scholar, you should have seen him in Nashville and The Incredible Shrinking Woman.
The Forum, the 159-seat theater at Stage West, has announced its 2002-03 season.
The drama Agnes of God, about a young nun accused of murdering her own baby, will play weekends Aug. 9-18. The tragi-comedy Gin Game, where two bitter, angry old people play a game of cards that eerily reflects their own lives, will be on weekends Oct. 11-20. And the spunky little 1980s feminist musical A . . . My Name Is Alice will play sometime in February.
I was hoping the Forum would do the musical's sequel, the 1990s A . . . My Name Is STILL Alice, which is much more up-to-date than the original, and, to be perfectly honest, I haven't seen. Ah, well.